Sorel, Nietzsche and ethical reasoning about violence: further thoughts on ‘Justifications for violence’, K. Magill, in L. Kurtz ed. The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, Academic Press, 2008 (2nd Edition) more

Sorel, Nietzsche and violence - Kevin Magill Page 1 of 3 Sorel, Nietzsche and ethical reasoning about violence: further thoughts on ‘Justifications for violence’, K. Magill, in L. Kurtz ed. The Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, Academic Press, 2008 (2nd Edition) Violence and instinct The arguments for and against violence considered in ‘Justifications for Violence’ all assume that violence requires justification, and that whether and in what circumstances it is justified can be established by reflection and reasoned argument. Reflection and reasoned argument, moreover, are assumed to be capable, in principle, of delivering judgments that any reasonable and decent person can accept. These assumptions have been subject to various criticisms relating to the human condition and the place of violence and morality within it. One familiar and persistent claim against moral reasoning about violence urges that human beings as natural creatures are subject to aggressive instincts. Violence and aggression, it is thought, are as inevitable a part of the life of a human being as of a lobster’s. The lobster, it may be supposed, is well served by its aggressive instincts. It needs a certain amount of territory and its instinctive aggression to any competitor that invades the territory helps insure its survival. The lobster, if it only knew it, has a reason for behaving aggressively. Human beings, as we have noted, sometimes also have reason for behaving aggressively, even violently. Sometimes they have alternatives to violence that will serve their interests better. Can the claim be that human beings are incapable of resisting their supposed aggressive instincts and reasoning through the alternatives? Is it that the supposed instincts are apt to subvert, in some way, our reasonings, especially our moral reasonings, about what to do? The claims might justifiably be made about some of the people all of the time, and even, perhaps, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Whatever illumination claims about aggressive instincts can be thought to provide, they do not issue in a convincing argument against the efficacy of practical and moral reasoning about the uses of violence. Supposing that investigation into human and animal instincts could establish that violence is an inevitable feature of human life (and we have, as yet, no compelling reason to believe that it ever will), it would not, by that alone, have established that practical and moral reasoning has no hope of helping to minimise the occurrence and bad effects of violence or of helping to ensure that as often as possible, where it is used, it is used to good effect. Virtues of conflict The notion that conventional moral reasoning, or moral reasoning tout court, can issue in informed and valid conclusions about the justifiability of violence has also been questioned and attacked by various philosophers and theorists, many (though not all) of romantic or anti-rationalist bent. Their criticisms have sometimes issued from wide-ranging reflections on the spiritual and moral health of modern Western cultural and social life, which it would be impossible to deal with here, and which it is difficult to distil or regiment into any well defined set of arguments or principles. A recurrent claim, nevertheless, is that war and violent conflict have great virtues, which escape conventional moral reasoning or, at any rate, are ignored by it. The claimed virtues of violent conflict can be divided into two kinds: those associated with the conduct of conflict, such as bravery, solidarity, loyalty, vitality, resolve, indomitability, national-pride, self-sacrifice and self-respect in opposition to oppression; and those which result from it, including economic, social and spiritual regeneration, social evolution, progress, invention, and so forth. There are obvious reasons why deontological and consequentialist moral reasoning about violence would set aside the supposed virtues of war and conflict. For deontologists the conditions in which violence can be justified are limited to self-defence from unjustified attack. The best that might be said for the virtues of conflict by deontologists is that sometimes some good comes of violence, but this could never provide any warrant for its use. The incompatibility in fundamental values and principles leaves little more to be said by way of useful contrast or argument between the thinking of advocates of the virtues of violence and deontological reasoning. There is greater scope for comparison with consequentialism. Consequentialists would regard the virtues associated with the conduct of conflict as mhtml:file://C:\Documents and Settings\easyPDFUser\Local Settings\Temp\BCL Technol... 4/10/2011 Sorel, Nietzsche and violence - Kevin Magill Page 2 of 3 deriving their virtue, such as it is, from their consequences, whether in preserving life or in furthering the just ends of violence. The virtues could not, in themselves, figure in any justification of violence. The remaining virtues, as consequences of war and conflict, could figure in consequentialist moral reasoning, but with the familiar provisos that there be a realistic expectation that they would be realised, that the good they contribute should outweigh the bad consequences and that there be no better alternatives. While some wars have resulted in progress, economic regeneration, and perhaps even spiritual regeneration, there are considerable grounds for scepticism about whether any contemplated war, much less any act of political violence, might satisfy Consequentialism’s three conditions for justification of violence: (1) that it aims and can realistically be expected to rectify serious and remediable wrong; (2) that it does not bring about worse consequences than would happen without it; and (3) that there are no alternative means of securing its aims that would have better consequences. The supposed virtues of violence might be taken together with the Consequentialist conditions, but, given the doubts about their providing a justification in their own right, it is doubtful whether their addition would significantly alter the balance for or against justification. If the neglected virtues of conflict are unlikely to provide a justification for violence by the standards of the kinds of moral reasoning we have considered, might there be other kinds of reasoning that would give them greater weight? Such a possibility could be derived from, for example, Sorel’s advocacy of violent class struggle. Sorel argued that violence in the form of a general strike would instil relations between the middle and working classes with vitality and creative energy. The peaceful and legal conduct of class struggles in France were, he thought, crippled by meanness, hatred, spite and dishonesty. Open warfare, in contrast to the structural violence of legal and political systems, would be honest and healthy and would allow the opposing interests to be pursued in a way that would bring dynamism and progress to class struggles to the benefit of both sides. Although Sorel’s claims involve a moral avowal of conflict and also - but his endorsement of this is far from clear - violence, he was uninterested in attempting to justify its use. One reason for this was that, in common with thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche (for different reasons), he viewed conventional morality as reflecting particular material interests and aspirations: a moral justification of violent class struggle would, on Sorel’s view, have been anathema to the self-serving moral outlook of the French middle classes. While such a claim would rule out the possibility of the kind of universalist justification of political violence required by both deontological and consequentialist ethics, it is possible that its use might be justified in line with an unconventional moral outlook such as Sorel’s or Nietzsche’s, in which the interests of particular classes, nations or individuals are treated as having special value, or in which other goods or rights - such as the virtues associated with the conduct of violence - replace or are given equal weighting with those associated with the kinds of consequentialism we have considered. Setting aside the possibility of non-universalist justifications for violence for the moment, if the virtues associated with the conduct of violence might be thought sufficient to justify it, the form of reasoning that would give us such a conclusion would be an unconventional form of consequentialism: one which might properly be compared with consequentialism in its more familiar forms. It might be thought that the outlooks or values of the conventional and the unconventional are, in this case, so far apart as to make any comparison pointless or redundant. Since, however, one purpose of examining the diverse considerations involved in justifications for political violence is to provide a framework for reflective persons to consider and to come to judgments of their own about the subject, rather than to follow scrupulously the arguments and commitments of those whose reflections we draw upon in doing so, a useful comparison can be made by considering how the opposing consequentialisms might stand in relation to the feelings and beliefs of those who have struggled and suffered through violent conflict. The comparison would be made more illuminating by focusing on the feelings of those whose violent struggles would have been considered just by, at any rate, some conventional consequentialist and some unconventional consequentialists. The aims and aspirations of those peoples, movements and communities who have opposed invasion and oppression with violence have notably included national self-determination, equality of rights and opportunity and even survival: all of them ends that can be grouped within the general goods and rights considered to be worth fighting for by the conventional mhtml:file://C:\Documents and Settings\easyPDFUser\Local Settings\Temp\BCL Technol... 4/10/2011 Sorel, Nietzsche and violence - Kevin Magill Page 3 of 3 varieties of consequentialism. Those movements and communities may, in the course of their struggles, have acquired some measure of self-respect, comradeship, dignity and even redemption, but how many of them would have considered it a loss to have secured their aims without the considerable and grievous costs, material, psychological and mortal, that those struggles also involved? Often enough, whether in Algeria, Vietnam, East Timor South Africa, Palestine or Nazi Germany and its occupied territories, their struggles received meagre compensation from the virtues of violence championed by Sorrel, Sartre and Frantz Fannon. To say the least, an unconventional consequentialism that justifies political violence in terms of virtues of the conduct of conflict requires an unusual determination to set aside what most would consider to be pertinent and grave consequences. If unconventional moral reasoning is unlikely to issue in a justification for violence that would be familiar or acceptable to those who have engaged in and supported violence and considered themselves right in doing so, is there a defensible case to be made against the very idea of a justification of violence? Nietzsche’s interest in the virtues of violence and conflict had to do primarily with war, but his writings on the subject have had some influence on those who have advocated political violence. He argued that war and conflict could sometimes be a source of ethical and spiritual regeneration in a way that would transcend the losses it entailed for individuals and communities. But the value of such regeneration was not reducible to any compensations or benefits that it would bring to individuals or communities. Perhaps for this reason, and also because he thought that war and conflict could also have quite opposite effects to those he endorsed, he appears to have been, like Sorel, uninterested in providing anything recognisably like a justification for violence. Whatever Nietzsche may have thought, at any rate, this would be one argument for the view that what good can come of violence must escape any reasoning about whether it can be justified. Conclusion Since Nietzsche’s several reflections on violence and conflict first appeared, there has been little evidence to support his qualified optimism about violence and conflict. Where ethical or spiritual regeneration have resulted from violence and conflict, it has largely been through the defeat and removal of unjust and oppressive governments and systems rather than as a result of the mere process of engaging in violence and conflict. If it has any historical support, the notion that violence and conflict brings moral and spiritual regeneration or even, as Sorel imagined, creativity and dynamism to human affairs, must be set against another feature of the modern world: the acceleration and proliferation of destructive technology. Even if we set this aside and suppose that Nietzsche had been correct in his claims about the good effects that can sometimes come of violence, and that those good effects must escape any reasoning about whether violence can be justified, it would not follow that such reasoning is redundant. Whatever forces and pressures may seem, in retrospect, to have made a given act of war or violence inevitable, its use has always followed from decisions to use it and it has sometimes not been used because political agents have decided not to use it. As noted already, Nietzsche appears only to have thought that the virtues of conflict were a possible consequence of it. And there is no obvious reason to suppose that virtues such as moral and spiritual regeneration are never realised by other means than violence. In that case, a consequentialist may argue, we must set aside whatever escapes reasoning and decisions about whether to use violence should be made according to what good and bad can realistically be expected to come of it and what alternatives are available. If the Nietzschean argument does establish that there are virtues of violence that escape moral reasoning, it does not show that those goods moral reasoning about violence can attend to should be ignored. mhtml:file://C:\Documents and Settings\easyPDFUser\Local Settings\Temp\BCL Technol... 4/10/2011